Editing the MediaWiki ISBN Links Page (For Amazon Associates, etc)

By default, MediaWiki links anything "ISBN xxxxxxxxxx" to Special:Booksources/xxxxxxxxxx, which has links to various stores where the visitor could buy that book. You probably want to monetize this by changing the Amazon link to include your Associates referral code. Here's how you do it:

• Figure our what your "namespace" is. At the bottom of every MediaWiki page, it says "About xxx". xxx is your namespace.
• Go to (your MediaWiki url and title scheme)/(your namespace):Book sources. Change the links to your liking, using MAGICNUMBER (all caps!) where ever you need the ISBN inserted. Save and test.

If you don't like using the Book sources page, you can change it by editing the contents of MediaWiki:Booksources.

Playstation Online: Credit Card Information Not Valid

When entering credit card info info via your PS3 to the Playstation Network, you may receive the error "Credit Card Information Not Valid." Try removing the second line of your address information to resolve this error.

The Future of Software Engineering

Despite IEEE efforts, there is industry confusion over what a software engineer (SE) is and what a programmer or computer scientist (CS) is. As it is taught at Rose-Hulman, the nation’s top undergraduate engineering college, software engineering is “the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.” It’s a broad field, and as such individual software engineers often specialize in some subset of the process. For example, I specialize in web engineering or “web science .”

Computer science on the other hand often puts its graduates into the role of the programmer – a code monkey who relishes in the design of elegant algorithms. According to Wikipedia , computer science is “the study and the science of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their implementation and application in computer systems.” In practice, an SE could be doing CS work and vice versa, but as taught at Rose-Hulman the SE has additional knowledge in project management and the entire software life cycle. An SE major usually chooses the SE path because he or she isn’t all that interested in the cut-and-dry coding part of the life cycle.

The two fields are rapidly moving apart, in part driven by the outsourcing of code monkey work. Outside of boutique software shops, software engineers are expected to focus on the initial and latter steps of the life cycle while managing others doing everything in between. Will the future bring more abstraction from coding for software engineers?

I think so. I’m not talking about abstraction from code – as technical managers, software engineers will always be knee deep in code – but from the actual coding itself. Case in point: open sourceology. Once just a morally good idea, I’ve seen many technologists self-describing themselves as open sourceologists these days. The benefits of open source are plentiful and self-obvious, and now we have people marketing themselves as being capable of choosing, integrating, and deploying customized open source solutions (myself included). Less than 5% of systems built today are completely new - see the A7 NRL Project. Some industry experts I’ve spoken to envision the future for software engineers being practically nothing but picking and choosing already written components to build a completely new system, ready-customized for the domain at hand. Others still like Shawn Bohner, Rose-Hulman’s new Director of Software Engineering, picture a world where software will write itself.

Another future, one which Google, Microsoft, Adobe and others are banking on, is web applications and cloud computing. AWAI-free world in which the accessing/input device used by the customer doesn’t matter, data can be securely accessed from anywhere, and desktop applications seamlessly integrate with web counterparts. Note that this future does not necessarily include data portability , but let’s hope it does. The software engineer in this world is best served by creativity and strong UI and communication skills, as customers can come and go as they please without needing to consult their IT department.

Any shop that doesn’t value web skills over traditional application skills – and yes, there is a difference - is doomed to fail in the second case, and any shop that continues to write everything from scratch will fall behind and/or fail in the first case. My advice to companies that want to survive into the next decade is to hire based on overall competencies in areas that are set to matter the most – creativity, UI, cross-compatibility, language independence, platform scaling, customer interaction and testing – and consider traditional skills “a plus.” Coding as an art can be beautiful, but it’s not what the customer sees and won’t pay the bills. Companies are catching on that there are already existing solutions available that mostly cover their needs and simply need a little tweaking for their individual requirements – I wouldn’t expect them to pay you to continually reinvent the wheel for too much longer.

Signature Position in Thunderbird

If you attach a signature in Thunderbird, it will by default put your reply below your signature and even ignore your choices if you try changing the position through the settings menu. To fix this, you're going to have to edit your preferences file manually.

• Close Thunderbird.
• Backup C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\randomHash.default\prefs.js to somewhere, like your desktop.
• Open C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\randomHash.default\prefs.js
• Change
  user_pref("mail.identity.id1.sig_bottom", true)
  into
  user_pref("mail.identity.id1.sig_bottom", false)
• There might be more user_pref("mail.identity.id1.sig_bottom", true) parameters depending on how many identities you have.
• Save and reopen Thunderbird and see if this fixed your problem. If not, maybe double check that you changed each and every identity.
• Do not try changing the position via the settings menu or it will revert to the default position.

Source: MozillaZine

Companies and Products That Suck, 2008 Edition

The New Year is a time to reflect, and this year's C&P That Suck edition primarily revolves around my recent move, which has been nothing short of ridiculous.

DirecTV

Skip Button Time Update: Around October, DirecTV snuck in an update which affected the duration of a "skip." I think it had something to do with Dish somehow copyrighting the "30-second skip." After the update, I was never able to correctly skip any number of commercials again.

False Sign-up Promotions: When I signed up, I was promised a $100 visa gift card within eight weeks. I filled everything out properly, even got confirmation that it was received by the third-party rebate processor, but I never received the card.

Broken Contracts: I signed up for a one year contract. This was confirmed by both the lady I signed up with, and the lady I disconnected with after 13 months of service. A few weeks later I receive a bill for a $150 early termination fee. I don't think so!

Dish Installation
When signing up via their standard customer service number, they told me it was alright that I didn't have a phone number at the time. The Indianapolis-based installer contacted me once via email, but ignored my response. The install window came and went without so much as a knock. I sent a second email asking who is responsible for notifying me when they reschedule - Dish or the installer - and was told that it's standard policy to not go on an install unless telephone contact has first been made. Yay for miscommunication.

Vectren Energy
A week before the move, the gas company was contacted and it was arranged that when the current resident's service was terminated it would immediately turn over to our name. This is what the customer service rep told us. Yet we went two days without heat because they turned it off and then send the same guy to turn it back on two days later. Even he said "I don't know why they would do this!"

But the one that takes the cake...
Verizon Internet
Three weeks before the move, Verizon was contacted and it was arranged that on the day of the move, service at our previous address would turn off and service at our new address would turn on. The customer service rep made it clear that this was possible. That night our Internet went out. We contacted customer service again, and a new rep who said no such thing was possible, and she cooked up a scheme to get service back on at our previous address - just cancel the move order. By the end of that week I still had no service, and my Verizon Online account was disabled. When I called customer service back, they no longer had any record of my ever having service! Apparently they immediately delete all records as soon as you "cancel service" - which is not what was ever supposed to happen in the first place. The only option they could present me with at this point was to put in a "new order" for either address, and it would be several weeks until it could be turned on, even at the previous address, because of the needless corporate bureaucracy needed for new orders, and no matter what I could not have my previous Verizon e-mail address back. Good thing I don't actually use my Verizon e-mail address! So I put in the "new order" for the new address, and was given a promise date of five days after our move-in. "Fine," I said, but that's hardly the end of it. The day comes and goes, and around 7pm that night I get a robo-call from Verizon saying that it's been rescheduled another 7 days - bringing my total Internet downtime to a full month. Now that day comes and goes, and they claim everything is peachy and begin billing me. Only problem is, I still don't have an Internet connection. On that day, one Verizon employee came out and did a line test. He didn't tell me, or Verizon for that matter, the result of the line test. The following week when the second employee comes out, he finds that the line connected to this house isn't even rated for DSL, and he had to spend two hours running a new line from down the block! Over a month from when the ordeal began, I finally have a connection. Only problem is, it might be called DSL and be using DSL protocols, but it's not giving me anymore than 2 x ISDN speed!



That green number up top is my DOWN speed! The sad thing is, I could have had Time Warner Cable Internet installed by now and probably not had any of the speed issues. I decided not to go that route, because they require a month lead time before they'll send an installer, and Verizon kept stringing me along week by week. Let's hope someone there is working next week...

Hamachi on Vista: Mediation server has rejected your login request

After upgrading to the latest version of Hamachi, I kept receiving this error: "Mediation server has rejected your login request." I ran through the solutions on the Hamachi site and none of them worked. Here's what did:

1. Close Hamachi.
2. Disable Windows Firewall (Through Your Control Panel).
3. Rename Hamachi Folder in %APPDATA%
4. Open Hamachi.
5. Create new account, DO NOT use the same username as last time.